I was recently asked how I became a Systems Administrator. I answered with the normal story of my life and moved on. However, it got me thinking about what has actually led me to where I am. A colleague of mine had recently mentioned how people love top x lists and best x lists so I sat down and came up with my list of top 10 traits of a Systems Administrator. Continue reading
I mentioned in my last post Shared console sessions that I would have an update to get near same functionality without setuid of the screen binary. Well here it is. Hopefully you are aware of expect and how it can be used to automate interactive programs like telnet. Expect is has many more uses that people are exploiting. Enter kibitz. Continue reading
I have had several posts regarding screen. Hopefully you have already realized the greatness of screen. Screen has a great feature that allows screen sessions to be shared. To my knowledge there are two ways to use this feature. First you can connect to a screen multiple times as the same user. Second you can use the multiuser mode of screen. Continue reading
Recently I found myself wanting to expose more and more internal web services to the outside. We have an internal mail caching server, ticket system, a handful of development sites, as well as several other internal web services that would be handy to access from remote locations. If you have internal dns, and your dns heirichy is sane you can probably use the same trick I did to allow any internal webservice that has a proper fqdn to work from outside your local LAN. I used Apache2, mod_proxy, and mod_rewrite. Only a few lines need to be altered in the default apache site install.
Working with virtual machines after having worked with physical machines can be a wonderful experience. Wonderful that is until the bios scree blows past you several times. Continue reading
I needed to install cpanel inside of one of my Centos 5.1 domU. The centos install was bootstrapped by the default rinse configuration (see xen-tools with my patch that you can see from a previous post). If you follow the install docs you will have tried to uninstall openldap etc …. Continue reading
After more testing I have narrowed the issue that I left off with to a problem with the yum conf inside of the chroot. Continue reading
At work I am just beginning the process of migrating from a hosted dedicated server to a Xen instance on a new server we have. Our dedicated server runs centos, and has WHM cpanel installed. So I figured it would be a good thing to have cpanel again as several people are familiar with it, and we do host a few random websites for people still. Cpanel does not support debian to my knowledge so Centos 5 sounds like the best way to go. Continue reading
Recently I ordered a server with Debian etch. Unfortunately during testing I noticed that startx was on the system, along with a whole slew of other junk that I don’t generally want on a fresh server. I wanted to remove all of the cruft but I didn’t have the exact package list. Continue reading
Im not a big fan of cpanel but I do manage a server that runs it. Recently some update was pushed down that caused about 50% of my users to not be able to access mail. It all boiled down to a permission issue that the cpanel scripts /scripts/mailperm did not take care of. Their scripts do not correct the permissions of the virtual user maildirs. Continue reading